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Thursday, March 31, 2011

I'm pleased to announce that Beginning Oracle Application Express 4 is finally published! I co-authored this book along with Doug Gault, Karen Cannell, Patrick Cimolini, and Timothy St. Hilaire. Co-authoring this book was a very interesting experience which was well worth the time and effort.

This book is aimed at beginner to intermediate APEX developers. It contains a lot of step by step instructions and detailed explanations to help you get a solid foundation for APEX development. You can purchase it from Amazon.com. If you'd prefer a soft copy the publisher, Apress, also offers the eBook.

Monday, March 21, 2011

I've been using Oracle's VirtualBox for several months now. I'm really impressed with this product and it has helped me a lot to rapidly prototype some APEX concepts.

One thing that bothered me when I started using it was that no matter what my virtual machine was doing, VirtualBox was using a lot of the CPU on my laptop. This didn't matter if the virtual machine was idle or doing any processing. After some digging around I found this very helpful post on the Oracle forums: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=9305831. As weird as it may sound the suggestion is to create and start a second, dummy, virtual machine. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked. The configuration that I used was: DOS as an OS. 4 MB of memory and a 4 MB hard drive. Disable all the extra stuff (network, audio, usb, etc).

Here are the screen shots of my CPU before and after I started the second, dummy, virtual machine:

Before:After:After starting the second virtual machine the CPU spiked for a few seconds then dropped significantly. Hopefully this issue will be fixed in a future version of VirtualBox but until then this is a very simple work around.